Abortion Comedy "Obvious Child" Is the Summer's Most Important Movie

Four decades after Roe v. Wade, a film finally offers an honest, funny look at terminating a pregnancy.

If you're a woman having an early abortion in the United States, your risk of death from the procedure is literally one in a million. But if you're a woman even contemplating having an abortion on screen, watch out: Your chances of dying are about 1 in 7.

Sure, movies don't imitate life to a T — if they did, "people sitting in cubicles, not saying anything remotely funny" would be a popular genre. But abortion on film and in television routinely sells a story line totally divorced from reality, punishing women who have abortions with death or following a high-drama, emotionally cloying narrative, reinforcing a particular idea of what abortion is: heart-wrenching, difficult, bad, punishable.

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But what if, for a lot of women, abortion isn't like that at all? What if it's a choice made in the context of an undesirable situation, but the best choice given the options? What if it's not a death sentence and not emotionally fraught and maybe even a catalyst for clarity in your relationships and your own sense of self?

What if abortion is a story's happy ending?

Obvious Child, a new film starring Jenny Slate and directed by Gillian Robespierre, is a romantic comedy wherein the main character, Donna — spoiler alert! — has an abortion. You'll probably see it compared to Juno a lot, not because the two films are actually all that much alike, but because the pregnancy experiences of young, single women are so seldom comedically addressed on screen that they get lumped together. In the film Donna gets dumped, has a one-night stand, gets pregnant, and decides to terminate. There's no aggrieved back-and-forth, no moment where she sees a child running through the park and reconsiders, no question of "Should I or shouldn't I?" and no finger-wagging or glowing mommy friend pushing her in a different direction. There's Donna, and her best friend who had an abortion in high school, and her mother who had an illegal abortion before Roe v. Wade. There are three women who live out the reality that 1 in 3 American women terminates a pregnancy in her life.

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"We didn't put that [judgmental] character in there because we've seen that character, and that's not a character I wanted to put in a movie," Robespierre said at a screening of the film hosted by NARAL Pro-Choice America and Cosmopolitan.com. "I wanted to tell a story in three different ways."

She added that it was important to show that having an abortion didn't define the rest of the characters' lives.

Yes, Obvious Child is an abortion film. But it's primarily a film that tracks neatly with romantic comedy construction and finds authenticity and humor in some of the rawest expressions of humanity. A few times, there's a joke about farts. But the comedy also comes in the film's treatment of pregnancy. There are few things more fundamental, or more common, than wanting to control your own reproductive capacity — humans have been trying to do that for about as long as humans have been around. Yet in our on-screen fantasy worlds, reproductive choices occupy a shockingly narrow space. This film expands it and situates abortion as one very common thing women do, but not the only thing any individual woman does.

"It's important that, yes, Donna has the abortion and she makes the decision," Slate said. "But what's interesting to me is how she lives her daily life."

The abortion is a plot device in the film, but not a traumatic one, or one that punishes Donna. Instead, it shows Donna who will show up for her. Her best friend is there from the moment she takes the test to the moment she goes to the clinic. Her mother finally says something close enough to the right thing. The guy who got her pregnant turns out to be a pretty decent human, and the abortion is a catalyst for a potential romantic relationship. It's a pregnancy story that has a happy ending, even when the ending isn't a baby.

And everyone laughs — because it's a comedy, and because real life is seldom as somber as portrayed in film renderings of Very Dramatic Topics.

But that doesn't mean it's easy. Donna doesn't have insurance and realizes the procedure will cost almost as much as her rent. She has to figure out whether, and then how, to tell the guy who got her pregnant. And she does have to make a choice to take a proactive step into her own future; with two doors open in front of her, she has to pick one to walk through. The film doesn't offer a neat conclusion, but it does leave you with the sense that, whatever else happens in Donna's life, this one thing will not define her. It's one important but certainly not life-altering — let alone life-ending — event.

"For so long the abortion story has been defined from the moment you walk into the clinic to the moment you walk out," said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "That's not an abortion story. That's a chapter. It's not the end."